Joseph Cox
speaker
591 appearances
4 recordings
3 series
first heard Jun 2024
last heard 28 Jan
Joseph Cox’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 2 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So he's trying to balance his master spreadsheet while his drugs are all being seized, and it's a complete mess. He ends up with these stress rashes all across his body. He's figuring out where his next sort of paycheck is going to be until eventually he basically admits defeat. And it's like, I'm out. I'm to zero.
And he's gone from this incredibly prolific drug smuggler to like a mess, basically. And it's not just Microsoft who is losing shipments. Some of his associates are having their drugs seized as well. There's even one point where Microsoft has introduced a colleague to the platform. He, in turn, gets more friends onto Anom, and they're raided immediately.
And there's just something off, and some people believe it's the phones. And they say there has to be something wrong with these devices. And Microsoft just won't hear it. He believes Anom is completely secure. He just blames other people and says they must be a rat or a snitch. For him, Anom is never the problem.
The U.S. government was the secret venture capitalist and puppet master and manager of Anom for its entire existence.
So in 2018, the FBI shut down an encrypted phone company called Phantom Secure. It had, you know, 7,000 to 10,000 users. It was very popular, very prolific. The Sinaloa drug cartel used it. Biker gangs in Australia did as well. Phantom Secure.
And when the FBI shut that down, they tried to get a backdoor into the company. That wasn't successful for a number of different reasons.
So sort of backed into a corner and realizing, hey, maybe I'm next, this person called Afgu approaches the FBI and the prosecutors and says, hey, I have this embryonic company right now. It's more of my brainchild. It's called a NOM. Would you like to take control of it? And in exchange, please give me a lesser sentence for any charges I may or may not face in the future.
I can't stress enough how big of an ace that is being played by AFKU. Like, if you imagine if you're an informant in a normal crime syndicate and say, oh, I told the FBI about the boss or whatever. Now imagine if you were offering the FBI the technical backbone to organize crime, at least potentially, for hundreds of crime syndicates around the entire globe. It's like, from this point on,
The FBI can take a NOM and they can grow it, at least theoretically, into infinity. You know, it's only dependent on how popular can we actually make this company.
But they need to make the app better, first of all. They need to make it so it's a project that people actually care about. And the way this comes about is that Afgoo, and then people sort of working with him, hire ordinary Android developers, some of whom I've spoken to, and they would log on to their job from a number of different Asian countries.
One I spoke to had their MacBook on their chest or their stomach from bed, like I think a lot of work-from-home people probably do nowadays. And he would just fix bugs, he would improve features in the app and in the device, because, okay, it's all well and good that we have this encrypted phone company, but if it's of low quality, nobody's even going to use the phone. It would be embarrassing.
Yeah, so these coders, they think they're just working for a normal Android development company, which is making an encrypted messaging app. They know that. That's fine. They also know there is a message copying feature inside a NOM. But what they're told is that, oh, this is for corporations who, yes, they want to have secure chats, but they need to keep an archive of the messages.
Maybe they work in banking, and this is very common where... you're having crypto messaging inside a financial institution, but to stop stuff like insider trading, there will be like a secure archive of all of the messages as well. So that's what the developers think they're making. They're not told who it's actually sold to, which of course is criminals.
And then you have those criminal resellers like Microsoft who are siloed from the rest of the company. But of course, they're also not told that the actual client above them is the FBI trying to build a surveillance apparatus.
One of those key people is Andrew Yang. Now, he's an assistant U.S. attorney, but he's not a drug prosecutor. He's from, like, the world of, like, tax and, like, white-collar crime. So, through a series of events, when he gets involved in the Phantom Secure case, and then the enorm opportunity comes up, he doesn't have...
the institutional baggage of the doj sort of hanging over him he sees this as a really cool chance to disrupt the drug trade whereas ordinarily in san diego what prosecutors and other agencies are doing is like we'll just seize drugs at the border we'll give these poor disenfranchised people who are probably trying to make two or three thousand dollars spuggling coke across the border we'll give them a pre-written plea deal you know and we'll move on with our lives
Andrew Young and other prosecutors and the FBI around him, they wanted to do something different. They wanted to do something that would actually disrupt, of course, not just the encrypted phone industry, but disrupt how drug crimes are investigated in the US or around the world.
When they started looking at this data, they realized, oh no, we need to triple that estimate, basically. It was like, they already knew, of course, the contours of organized crime, but an entire iceberg emerged underneath the water's surface, where it was like, oh no, this is way bigger than we anticipated. And
Something that doesn't normally come up in ordinary criminal investigations, but it did with Anom, is the sheer amount of public corruption involved in the drug trade. You're going to have corrupt law enforcement officials giving tips to their criminal cohorts, You can have people in ports, in airports as well.
And there's sort of this interface between the criminal world and the legitimate economy. And it turns out these actually overlap way more than many of the officials reading the messages actually previously understood.
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